Are the ANC pulling a fast one while Nkandla fills the headlines? This is a must read for every South African; this is an excerpt from an article by Riaan Malan on BizNews 16 Dec 2014 In a new book titled “BEE: Helping or Hurting?”, Ms Jeffery tracks this process back to 2011, when the ANC first suspended Mr Malema. She shows how it gained traction at the ANC’s 2012 national conference in Mangaung (formerly Bloemfontein), where Mr Zuma famously announced that the second phase of the South African revolution was about to begin. The rest of the media reported his speech and fell asleep. Ms Jeffery, almost uniquely, kept her eye on the ball, tracking radical policy proposals as they moved into draft bills and, in most cases, into measures since adopted by Parliament, if not yet signed into law by the president. According to Ms Jeffery, it is naïve to believe that the ANC remains committed to the National Development Plan (NDP), a programme whose moderate precepts were warmly applauded by the World Bank, the IMF and foreign investors. She believes the party has quietly abandoned the NDP and is poised to move rapidly leftward, a move that could render Mr Malema irrelevant. Since Ms Jeffery’s analysis is not exactly conventional wisdom, sceptics might wish to suspend judgement until they have read her dissection of the 2013 Protection of Investment Bill, which strips foreign investors of the right to appeal to international arbitrators if the South African government seizes their assets. Or the 2013 Mining Amendment Bill, which allows the government to take control of oil or gas fields developed by private companies and pay whatever compensation it pleases. Or a new land reform proposal that requires farm owners to give up 50% of their land, effectively without compensation. Also of interest is the draft 2013 Expropriation Bill, which empowers thousands of officials at all three tiers of government to expropriate property of virtually any kind. This should be read alongside the aforementioned Investment Bill, which seeks to allow the government to do so without compensation—provided that it is acting as “a custodian” for the previously disadvantaged. This would in theory enable the state to confiscate any business as “custodian” and then invite blacks to apply to run it without paying anything. The process could be expedited if the property on which this business stands is subject to a land claim. So it is perhaps not coincidental that the ANC has recently re-opened the land claims process and expects to receive close to 400,000 new claims over the next five years. Lay these ANC laws alongside the EFF’s manifesto and it becomes clear that any ideological differences between the parties are less significant than the rivalry between their respective leaders. This clash produces showers of sparks, but does the outcome really matter? If Mr Malema wins, South Africa will become a socialist people’s republic, devoid of economic growth and foreign investment. If Mr Zuma prevails, ditto. If the nation is to avoid this fate, we have to look for salvation elsewhere. Since June 2014, when the EF Fighters made their parliamentary debut, the DA has taken a public battering simply for being itself—a sober, hardworking party staffed by MPs and researchers whose heads are perpetually buried in dull position papers and whose leader, Mr Maimane, is a politician in the suave Barack Obama vein; a thoroughbred alongside Mr Malema’s dray horse. It irked me to see him belittled simply because his manners are better than Mr Malema’s. Would we really prefer a blustering charlatan? At the last election, the DA won the support of about 23% of the electorate. With majority support in the white, coloured and Indian communities and three-quarters of a million black voters, the DA is the only truly multiracial party in South Africa. With 89 members of Parliament, it is also the only party whose embrace of rule of law and at least relatively free enterprise seems to offer an alternative to policies presently dragging South Africa into deepening crisis. *Rian Malan is one of the leading South African writers of his generation. This article first appeared in Africa in Fact, the journal of Good Governance Africa.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:18:53 +0000
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